July 6, 2015

We have just released a raft of our best-selling books in reasonably priced, laminate hardcover editions. They are now available from both Amazon US and Amazon UK and other resellers such as Barnes and Noble online.

May 7, 2015

Can a small, almost mundane detail in accounts of anomalous events—be it encounters with UFO entities, faeries, or Sasquatch—reveal anything valuable about the nature of these unusual events? Probably not, right? Well, think again. This new book by Joshua Cutchin, A Trojan Feast, is an intellectual romp through some of the strangest material this side of the rabbit hole. In it, Cutchin examines reports of the food and drink offering of aliens, faeries, and Sasquatch, and discovers that all is not what it appears to be. A glance at some chapter titles illustrates the ranges of topics covered: the Sattvic Diet, Sleep Paralysis, Sexuality, Entheogens, Eating the God and Rebirth, and Absorption, Ointment, and the Entity Diet. Noted folklorist Thomas E. Bullard, who wrote the Foreword, says: “The humble subject of food in anomalistic accounts serves, in Cutchin’s measured, learned, and lucid argument, as proof that high strangeness events may be uncertain and discordant, but not incomprehensible.” We think this book is destined to be a fortean classic.

February 23, 2015

“Just because you have never seen a fairy does not mean that no one else has. This truth is apparent from the new book Seeing Fairies, by Marjorie T. Johnson.” That’s from an article entitled “Leave Your Wings at the Door” by Michael Tortorello in the October 1, 2014, issue of, yes, The New York Times. It’s not often that one of our books gets mentioned in old The Grey Lady, so we are thankful for the plug. That said, the book has been a catalyst for some very thoughtful reviews. One of them, by James McClendon, appeared in the excellent journal Paranthropology and is worth quoting at length: “Collections of anomalous experiences are valuable in that they allow evaluation of hypotheses regarding the incidence and nature of unusual perceptions. This endeavor sheds light on the nature of human consciousness….Marjorie Johnson’s collection of fairy accounts is in harmony with this theory in that many experiencers believe in what they perceive. People with a propensity for anomalous experience are unable to remain skeptical; their experiences generate belief. . .There are also a number of secondary elements within these experiences that support the idea that the propensity for fairy experience has genetic basis. All over the world, people have noted that propensity for anomalous experience runs in families. Johnson’s accounts support this hypothesis….The interpretation of anomalous experiences may be shaped by belief but they are not completely products of belief…Seeing Fairies is worth reading by anyone curious about the diversity of anomalous experience available to human beings.” More thoughtful commentary came from Malcolm Smith, whose review, entitled “What Sort of People See Fairies?” is also worth quoting at length: “If we discarded all [fairy] cases where we suspected, however weakly, that the witness had been in an altered psychological state at the time, and if we culled out, fairly or unfairly, all those who claimed ‘second sight’ or more than one encounter, we are still left with a couple of hundred testimonies for which the only reason for not believing them is that they are, well, unbelievable. Even if we further reject all those whose witnesses were pre-teenagers at the time, we still have a large number of first hand accounts which would be taken seriously if they involved a crime, or some other mundane event. It is the old Hynekan quandary: what do you do when perfectly credible people tell perfectly incredible stories?”

January 19, 2015

We can’t think of a better way to introduce our newest book, In Search of Lake Monstersby Peter Costello, than by quoting the words it inspired in Bernard Heuvelmans, the “father of cryptozoology,” who wrote: “Peter Costello authoritatively surveys the whole subject, supporting his arguments with a substantial bibliography, and displaying both the elegance of the born writer and the sense of humor essential to every occasion.” This pioneering classic in the field of cryptozoology is an overview of lake monsters reports from all over the world that provides a convincing explanation of the identity of these elusive denizens. This new edition of the book contains a new Afterword by the author, an Introduction by Loren Coleman, and a Preface by, yes, Bernard Heuvelmans. So don’t miss it.

December 3, 2014

This book is destined to be our most controversial book yet—and not just because of its title. In Why Science is Wrong…About Almost Everything, Alex Tsakiris, who is best known for the popular Skeptiko podcast, goes head-to-head with mainstream science on the issue on consciousness. He delivers a blistering attack on the entrenched view that humans are mere biological robots. Science is wrong about almost everything, he insists, because science depends on our consciousness being an illusion. And it’s not. In the course of the book, he discusses near-death experiences, mediums, telepathy, healing, psychic detectives, evolution, and much more. “Alex writes as our conscience here,” notes Rice University professor Jeffrey Kripal, “as he calls us all to balk against the silly and self-contradictory script that is reductive materialism.”

September 18, 2014

The most recent meeting of the Invisible College of UFO researchers took place in Paris in July 2014. Sponsored by the CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), the French equivalent of NASA, the meeting involved scientists and UFOlogists from around the world who discussed the methods and tools needed to improve the collection and analysis of UFO information. Among those attending were Richard Haines, Méheust Bertrand, Ron Westrum, and, of course, Jacques Vallee, who 40 years ago wrote a book on this informal network of dedicated researchers entitled The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influence on the Human Race. The book has just been reprinted by Anomalist Books, and in the foreword to this new edition Vallee notes that the questions he first raised all those decades ago remain current. This reprint is an effort to make a new generation of interested readers aware of those important issues (without paying exorbitant used-book prices for it).

September 8, 2014

The response to the publication of Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times by Marjorie T. Jonhson has been swift and overwhelmingly positive. Fortean researcher Theo Paijmans kicked it off with a Tweet: “I think this is the most wonderful book published so far this year.” Author and fortean Janet Bord, writing in Magonia, found the experience of reading this book “a disturbing experience. [The stories in this book] give the impression that the countryside is heavily populated with little people who live alongside us but are never seen by most of us. Can this really be true?…Wherever the truth is to be found, this book is essential reading for anyone with the slightest interest in fairies and the Little People.” Chris Woodyard of Haunted Ohio added: “Whatever we call them, and whatever guise they wear, it is fascinating to see the points at which the worlds of the fairies and other supernatural entities intersect.” The Fairy Folklorist commented: “This book truly does open a great many new and exciting doors into fairy research…An essential read for all dedicated fairy folklorists!” And Fred Lobb of Chinese Folktales summed it all up, saying “Seeing Fairies is a boon to the scholarship on folklore. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in psychology, anthropology and parapsychology.”

July 8, 2014

Fairy encounters in the 20th century? Are you kidding me? But wait, you’re willing to consider the possibility of ETs in our midst, but “fairies” are beyond your boggle threshold? Think again. To begin with there is not that much difference between who reports these kinds of experiences: they are business men and women, housewives, journalists, clergymen, bus drivers, school teachers, university professors, soldiers, artists, authors, poets, musicians, actresses, and many others. All of their encounters are reported in a just published book, Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times by Marjorie T. Johnson. In fact, this book is the biggest collection of fairy sightings ever assembled: more than 400 in all. And the backstory of how this book came about—and its significance—is told in a riveting introduction by historian Simon Young, who has written extensively on the middle ages and fairy lore.

May 5, 2014

Yes, John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies is a great book; it’s a scary and very entertaining story. But that book doesn’t explain what Keel really thought about all the craziness going on in our world. The book that connects the dots is The Eighth Tower, which is made up of material that was left out of The Mothman Prophecies then expanded upon by Keel, who is regarded by many as one of the legendary writers on the paranormal. Keel’s long forgotten classic on the science behind many paranormal phenomena has been reprinted by Anomalist Books as both a print and an ebook and people have made it our newest best-seller. “This is—in my opinion—the one Keel title, more than any other,” writes Nick Redfern in his review of the book on Mysterious Universe, “that really gets close to figuring out where the nightmarish monsters, strange creatures, ‘aliens,’ magical entities and more that so many have witnessed actually come from. Welcome to the world of what Keel called ‘the superspectrum’… Keel tackles the subject in such a refreshing and thought-provoking fashion that it becomes hard to deny that the man was clearly on the right path, even if—by his own admittance—much of the nature of the superspectrum remains mystifying…a very important book.”

March 5, 2014

Our two bestselling controversial history books are now available in ebook editions for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple. First and foremost we have Brad Steiger’s thought-provoking and pioneering work on the existence of a global prehistoric civilization, Worlds Before Our Own. We also have Patrick Huyghe’s provocative heretical history of who was first in the Americas, Columbus Was Last. In the months to come we will be issuing ebook editions of other reprinted works from the Anomalist Books stable. Next up, we’ll have Jacques Vallee’s definitive work on UFOs, his Alien Contact Trilogy: Dimensions, Confrontation, and Revelations.